


From A Certain Point of View

by Caedus501



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: (Doing its Death Star thing), Death Star, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-06
Updated: 2017-02-06
Packaged: 2018-09-22 08:57:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9598679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caedus501/pseuds/Caedus501
Summary: Kyrie could tell he was a bit slack jawed and wide eyed as he took in the results of Grand Moff Tarkin’s and Director Krennic’s “test.”“Oh, it’s beautiful!”  Krennic, dressed impeccably in his white tunic and crisp black trousers, said from his vantage point near the viewport.Beautiful. Beautiful?!Vaping moffs! They had completely destroyed the surface of the planet!  Sure the target had been Jedha City, but it’s not as though the shockwave from the blast just stopped at the outer city limits.  How could the deaths of so many, the death of a world, be classified as beautiful?***Lieutenant Kyrie of the bridge crew on the Death Star thinks about the Empire and his place in it in the aftermath of Jedha.





	

**Author's Note:**

> While watching Rogue One I couldn't help but notice the expressions on the faces of some of the background characters on the overbridge of the Death Star after the test fire at Jedha. Something about the way a couple of them looked slightly stunned and uncomfortable made me want to know what they were thinking, and poof, Lieutenant Rece Kyrie was born. I figure, if you're stationed on the Death Star you had to want to be a part of the Imperial Navy, but did you know precisely what you signed up for?
> 
> Some of the dialogue is taken directly from the movie/the novelization by Alexander Freed. I also tried to be as true to canon for my chosen Mid-Rim world as possible.
> 
> I hope you enjoy what I came up with!

Lieutenant Rece Kyrie stood at his station in front of the readouts for the Hypermatter Annihilator Unit on the pristine overbridge of the Death Star gazing at the scene unfurling in the viewport.  Everything on the bridge was all sharp angles polished to a shine and so incredibly still.  The sterile environment created by the high gloss floors, gunmetal bulkheads, and starched uniforms made the the raging torrent of earth that filled the viewport more impressive by comparison.  The red hued desert planet of Jedha seemed to ripple before his eyes in the aftermath of the emerald green precision blast from the battle station.  Kyrie could tell he was a bit slack jawed and wide eyed as he took in the results of Grand Moff Tarkin’s and Director Krennic’s “test.”

“Oh, it’s beautiful!”  Krennic, dressed impeccably in his white tunic and crisp black trousers, said from his vantage point near the viewport.

Beautiful. _Beautiful?!_

Vaping moffs! They had completely destroyed the surface of the planet!  Sure the target had been Jedha City, but it’s not as though the shock wave from the blast just stopped at the outer city limits.  How could the deaths of so many, the death of a world, be classified as beautiful?

Kyrie had no words for the moment. 

All around him he could hear other members of the bridge crew quietly cheering and congratulating one another on a successful test. He was unsure if the “success” was the decimation of the planet or that the battle station hadn’t gone into catastrophic power failure after unleashing the superlaser for the first time and leaving them with nothing but the emergency life support systems running.

Kyrie remained silent at his console, eyes locked on the view of Jedha and its roiling surface.

“Lieutenant! Report!”

The surprisingly loud imperative snapped Kyrie out of his slight daze.  He glanced at the face in front of him barely long enough to ascertain that it was his commanding officer glaring impatiently, then focused on what the numbers on the screen before him actually meant.

He quickly scanned the data.  “Thermal radiation levels are stabilizing, sir.  The additional exhaust ports are successfully venting a majority of the excess heat and particle buildup that resulted from firing the primary weapon.”  The Commander in front of him merely raised an eyebrow, waiting for more.  “The hypermatter annihilator unit is operating at maximum efficiency, sir,” Kyrie finished.

“Excellent!” The Commander said with a firm nod of his head before turning away. “Excellent!”

Beautiful.  Excellent.  Neither word felt at all appropriate for the occasion.

Jedha continued to burn.

Lieutenant Kyrie fully tuned back in to his surroundings when he noticed Director Krennic gesticulating forcefully in his ongoing battle of wills with Grand Moff Tarkin.

“…And what you witnessed today?  That is only an inkling of the destructive potential –“

Tarkin cut him off. “I will tell the Emperor that I will be taking control over the weapon _I_ first spoke of years ago… effective immediately.”

Kyrie quickly turned back to his readout display.  Aside from not wanting to get caught eavesdropping on what was beginning to sound like a dangerous situation, he was trying to hide his shock at Krennic’s words.

Of course he knew that the battle station was capable of more.  This was only a single reactor ignition test, after all.  But just what would a full power strike look like?  The words _planet killer_ arose in the back of Kyrie’s mind.  The rumors about the new DS-1 Orbital Battle Station had been rife throughout the Imperial Navy, but the lieutenant hadn’t really believed any of them.  The Empire _he_ knew brought order to chaos and justice to the lawless fringes of space. There was no casual genocide.

_I suppose they named it the_ Death Star _for a reason,_ Kyrie thought to himself.

The weapons test seemed to have caused an internal struggle in Kyrie’s mind, and he had no idea how to resolve it.  His experiences of the Empire were largely from growing up on Bimmisaari – a Mid-Rim world just on the edge of Hutt space and outside the Perlemian Trade Route – and mostly positive.  He hadn’t been born on Bimmisaari, but he and his small family had been relocated there when his native homeworld had been ravaged by the Separatists in the Clone Wars.  Kyrie had been seven years old at the time.

A company of clone troopers led by a cloaked Jedi had helped all the refugees load onto three troop transport ships and then disembark on the sparsely populated world half-way across the galaxy where they set up a temporary camp while more permanent accommodations could be built.  When the Republic had been reorganized into the Galactic Empire the clone troops had been pulled out of the Halla sector and replaced with a new set of white plastoid wearing troopers and a new _Imperial I_ -class Star Destroyer had taken up residence in the system.  On the whole, life didn’t change much for a young Rece Kyrie, everything was just a little safer. 

The Mid-Rim wasn’t inherently dangerous, but being so close to Hutt Space came with its own perils.  Piracy was not uncommon in the spacelanes around Bimmisaari.  Various gang leaders and crime rings prowled the sector and sometimes set up interdictor ships along the trade routes to make their living preying on merchant vessels and luxury starliners.  The Imperial Navy had put a stop to all that.  It became less dangerous to travel offworld, and the fledgling settlement was able to get its regular supply shipments.  Nearly twenty years later, Bimmisaari was actually starting to become a significant trading post.  The world’s refugee and immigrant inhabitants owed their local economy and their livelihoods almost entirely to the Empire.

Most of the trouble Bimmisaari faced these days came from the Rebel Alliance.  The disturbances never came in the form of a direct attack on the planet, that didn’t seem to be the Rebellion’s style. Instead they harassed the Imperial installations in nearby systems which sometimes resulted in the patrolling Star Destroyer and accompanying smaller ships being called away to engage with the Rebels elsewhere.  That left the space around Bimmisaari open to the predations of opportunistic pirates and insurgents. 

The stories of the deaths and acts of terror the Rebellion had been responsible for had played a significant role in Kyrie’s wish to join the Imperial Navy.  He wanted to give back to the Empire that had given his family stability, protection, and even prosperity over the years.  He wanted to give other children in the galaxy the chance to grow up without having to experience the hardships of war.

So how could the Empire do something like this?  On a whim an entire civilization had been reduced to ash and dust.  Kyrie was uncomfortable with his complicity in that type of military action through his mere presence on the bridge.  When he had been given the posting on the new deep-space mobile battle station his friends from the Imperial Academy on Carida were incredibly jealous and he himself had been extremely proud. A group of them who all happened to be planetside at the time had gone to a local cantina to celebrate and talk endlessly about what they thought the new battle station would actually be capable of.

“Rumor is, they had to develop a whole new system of shield generators for it, not to mention all the research that had to go into energy enrichment just to give it enough juice to be hyperspace capable!” Jaxson had said.  He was a newly promoted signals officer who would be shipping off in a day or two for the Star Destroyer _Manticore_ somewhere near the Maw Cluster.

“I know this engineer who said just figuring out how all the high ups wanted the artificial gravity to be oriented was a complete headache,” Bel added in a bit of a slur while simultaneously sloshing half his spiced ale across the table.  “Is it like a planet, all pointing to the center? Or did some Moff decide which way was up and they built all the decks accordingly?  Does something that massive have its own gravity field?” He asked, gesturing expansively and hitting Rook upside the head.

“Just how big are we talking here?” The unassuming pilot asked while he leveled a mild glare at Bel.

“Dunno,” Kyrie commented.  “I don’t think the Empire wants anyone to know it exists yet. Technically, not even the Navy.”

“It’s just…” Bodhi Rook hesitated, looking both nervous and excited all at once.  “It’s just, I heard that it could house eight entire fighter wings!  Eight! Can you imagine?”  Rook had always been a bit starry eyed about the TIE pilots, but he usually seemed content enough just shuttling cargo between systems.

“Well _Lieutenant_ Kyrie here won’t have to imagine anything soon!” Bel clapped him on the back and raised a hearty toast in his honor.

Kyrie had happily joined in with their revelry and speculation, but he had never really thought the Empire would actually use the fifteen thousand turbolaser batteries, let alone the superlaser he knew nothing about at the time, to _kill a planet_.  He could understand bringing the superlaser to bear on the Rebel capital ships, like those Mon Calamari cruisers, since they were legitimate military targets.  But never against a world.  Even if there had been a band of Rebels on Jedha, they could only have been forty or fifty strong at most.  The rest of the population was made up of innocent civilians, all of whom were now dead.

_Oh, come on, Rece, you knew what was going on.  Don’t you remember what Mother used to say about those former Legacy worlds when you were little? Places like Waidi Rafa and Samovar. This isn’t the first planet the Empire has destroyed, even if it is the most blatant example._

_Do you remember the Jedi?  What do you think really happened to them?_

_It’s called the_ Death _Star._

The lieutenant briefly closed his eyes, blocking out the unsettling view, and took a deep breath.  He could no longer ignore what his conscience and the evidence in front of his own eyes was trying to tell him.  Maybe it was time to start taking a closer look at exactly how the Empire maintained its control and where it got the raw materials for the ever increasing Imperial Fleet.  Almost from its inception at the end of the Clone Wars, the Empire had been willing to do whatever it saw fit to bring the entire galaxy under the control of its iron fist.  While Kyrie may have benefited personally from the newly patrolled spacelanes around his home planet and the boost in trade throughout the entire Halla sector, he could no longer let his silent presence be tacit approval of the Imperial war machine.  He may not be quite ready to run into the arms of the Rebel Alliance, but resigning his post was probably a place to start. 

Of course, he had never heard of anyone just walking out of the Imperial Navy before. There had been defectors and deserters in the past, but Kyrie couldn’t think of anyone who had officially resigned and walked out, free and clear.  Generally speaking, you served until you reached the mandatory retirement age or you died in action.  He could possibly request a transfer, but being stationed on a Star Destroyer somewhere else in the galaxy wouldn’t erase the burning image of Jedha from his mind. 

It was daunting to even consider leaving the Imperial Navy while standing at his post surrounded by industrious officers and the efficient bustling of crewmen, let alone how he would accomplish it.  Just getting off the Death Star would be a feat.  Troop transport shuttles didn’t arrive all that often, so even if he could actually just resign, Kyrie would probably be stuck on the station for at least another four standard months.  How much damage could a fully operational Death Star do in four months?  He didn’t want to find out.

Simply walking off while on leave wasn’t even a plan worth considering.  Imperial officers barely ever went on shore leave and it was practically unheard of to take leave to visit family.  There was no hope for a scheme of disappearing in some bustling city when the circumstances for being in said city would never arise.

Stealing a ship, either outright or through some clever manipulating of rosters and duty rotations, wasn’t an option either since he had no piloting skills.  The best he could do was keep his eyes open and hope for some sort of opportunity to present itself.  Hopefully sooner rather than later.  Exactly where he would go and what he would do once free of the Empire was another matter entirely.  For now, all Lieutenant Kyrie wanted was to wash the dust of Jedha off his skin and scrub the blood from his hands.

The Galactic Empire may have started as a good idea, but it had grown into something vast and monstrous.  There was no certainty that something like Jedha would ever happen again, but there was also no guarantee that it wouldn’t.  Kyrie couldn’t justify the destruction of whole worlds for a couple of Rebels, even in the pursuit of peace.  That’s not what _his_ Empire did. 

The drama on the bridge had died down while Lieutenant Kyrie had been lost in his own musings.  Krennic and his black clad death troopers were gone, leaving Tarkin and a few others to stare down on what many had once considered a holy planet.  Everyone else simply carried on with their appointed tasks of ensuring the various systems all checked out and no wayward ships entered the system.

Kyrie would try not to forget this day and how it felt to watch Jedha as it succumbed to the power of the Death Star.  Maybe there would be a time in the future when his memories would be able to convince someone well connected in the Empire, that there was no need for this kind of cruelty and destruction.  He could tell them that the Empire could be more than an iron fist; that the Empire could, in fact, be an outstretched hand lifting up the fallen while still ensuring peace and security in the galaxy.

**Author's Note:**

> ...So, spoiler alert: given the timeline between the destruction of Jedha and the Battle of Yavin, Lieutenant Kyrie does not, in fact, make it off the Death Star to spread his vision of what the Empire could be. How's that for depressing? I guess if you're going to desert or defect you should be proactive about it, like Finn in TFA. Anyway, I hope you liked seeing things from the other side. Thanks for reading! Comments, questions, or concerns are welcome.


End file.
